When Eight Bells Toll

I cursed this nautical idiot from the depths of my sleep-ridden being, swung a pair of unsteady legs to the deck and levered myself out of the bunk. I almost fell down, I seemed to have only one leg left, and my neck ached fiercely. A glance at the mirror gave quick external confirmation of my internal decrepitude. A haggard unshaven face, unnaturally pale, and bleary bloodshot eyes with dark circles under them. I looked away hurriedly, there were lots of things I could put up with first thing in the morning, but not sights like that.

I opened the door across the passage. Hunslett was sound asleep and snoring. I returned to my own cabin and got busy with the dressing-gown and Paisley scarf again. The iron-lunged thumping character outside was still at it, if I didn’t hurry he would be roaring out ‘avast there’ any moment. I combed my hair into some sort of order and made my way to the upper deck.

It was a cold, wet and windy world. A grey, dreary, unpleasant world, why the hell couldn’t they have let me sleep on. The rain was coming down in slanting sheets, bouncing inches high on the decks, doubling the milkiness of the spume-flecked sea. The lonely wind mourned through the rigging and the lower registers of sound and the steep-sided wind-truncated waves, maybe three feet from tip to trough, were high enough to make passage difficult if not dangerous for the average yacht tender.

They didn’t make things in the slightest difficult or dangerous for the yacht tender that now lay alongside us. It maybe wasn’t as big – it looked it at first sight – as the Firecrest, but it was big enough to have a glassed-in cabin for’ard, a wheel-house that bristled and gleamed with controls and instrumentation that would have been no disgrace to a VC-10 and, abaft that, a sunken cockpit that could have sunbathed a football team without overcrowding. There were three crewmen dressed in black oilskins and fancy French navy hats with black ribbons down the back, two of them each with a boat-hook round one of the Firecrest’s guardrail stanchions. Half a dozen big inflated spherical rubber fenders kept the Firecrest from rubbing its plebeian paintwork against the whitely-varnished spotlessness of the tender alongside and it didn’t require the name on the bows or the crew’s hats to let me know that this was the tender that normally took up most of the after-deck space on the Shangri-la.

Amidships a stocky figure, clad in a white vaguely naval brass-buttoned uniform and holding above his head a golf umbrella that would have had Joseph green with envy, stopped banging his gloved fist against the Firecrest’s planking and glared up at me.

‘Ha!’ I’ve never actually heard anyone snort out a word but this came pretty close to it. ‘There you are at last. Took your time about it, didn’t you? I’m soaked, man, soaked!’ A few spots of rain did show up quite clearly on the white seersucker. ‘May I come aboard?’ He didn’t wait for any permission, just leaped aboard with surprising nimbleness for a man of his build and years and nipped into the Firecrest’s wheelhouse ahead of me, which was pretty selfish of him as he still had his umbrella and all I had was my dressing-gown. I followed and closed the door behind me.

He was a short, powerfully built character, fifty-five I would have guessed, with a heavily–tanned jowled face, close-cropped iron-grey hair with tufted eyebrows to match, long straight nose and a mouth that looked as if it had been closed with a zip-fastener. A good-looking cove, if you liked that type of looks. The dark darting eyes looked me up and down and if he was impressed by what he saw he made a heroic effort to keep his admiration in check.

‘Sorry for the delay,’ I apologised. ‘Short of sleep. We had the customs aboard in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get off after that.’ Always tell everyone the truth if there’s an even chance of that truth coming out anyway, which in this case there was: gives one a reputation for forthright honesty.

‘The customs?’ He looked as if he intended to say ‘pshaw’ or ‘fiddlesticks’ or something of that order, then changed his mind and looked up sharply. ‘An intolerable bunch of busybodies. And in the middle of the night. Shouldn’t have let them aboard. Sent them packing. Intolerable.

What the deuce did they want?’ He gave the distinct impression of having himself had some trouble with the customs in the past.

‘They were looking for stolen chemicals. Stolen from some place in Ayrshire. Wrong boat.’

‘Idiots!’ He thrust out a stubby hand, he’d passed his final judgment on the unfortunate customs and the subject was now closed. ‘Skouras. Sir Anthony Skouras.’

‘Petersen.’ His grip made me wince, less from the sheer power of it than from the gouging effects of the large number of thickly encrusted rings that adorned his fingers. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see some on his thumbs but he’d missed out on that. I looked at him with new interest. ‘Sir Anthony Skouras. I’ve heard of you of course.’

‘Nothing good. Columnists don’t like me because they know I despise them. A Cypriot who made his shipping millions through sheer ruthlessness, they say. True. Asked by the Greek Government to leave Athens. True. Became a naturalised British citizen and bought a knighthood. Absolutely true. Charitable works and public services. Money can buy anything. A baronetcy next but the market’s not right at the moment. Price is bound to fall. Can I use your radio transmitter? I see you have one.’

‘What’s that?’ The abrupt switch had me off-balance, no great achievement the way I was feeling.

‘Your radio transmitter, man! Don’t you listen to the news? All those major defence projects cancelled by the Pentagon. Price of steel tumbling. Must get through to my New York broker at once!’

‘Sorry. Certainly you may – but, but your own radio-telephone? Surely -’

‘It’s out of action.’ His mouth became more tight-lipped than ever and the inevitable happened: it disappeared. ‘It’s urgent, Mr Petersen.’

‘Immediately. You know how to operate this model?’

He smiled thinly, which was probably the only way he was capable of smiling. Compared to the cinema-organ job he’d have aboard the Shangri-la, asking him if he could operate this was like asking the captain of a transatlantic jet if he could fly a Tiger Moth. ‘I think I can manage, Mr Petersen.’

‘Call me when you’re finished. I’ll be in the saloon.’ He’d be calling me before he’d finished, he’d be calling me before he’d even started. But I couldn’t tell him. Word gets around. I went down to the saloon, contemplated a shave and decided against it. It wouldn’t take that long.

It didn’t. He appeared at the saloon door inside a minute, his face grim.

‘Your radio is out of order, Mr Petersen.’

‘They’re tricky to operate, some of those older jobs,’ I said tactfully. ‘Maybe if I -’

‘I say it’s out of order. I mean it’s out of order.’

‘Damned odd. It was working -’

‘Would you care to try it, please?’

I tried it. Nothing. I twiddled everything I could lay hands on. Nothing.

‘A power failure, perhaps,’ I suggested. ‘I’ll check -’

‘Would you be so good as to remove the faceplate, please?’

I stared at him in perplexity, switching the expression, after a suitable interval, to shrewd thoughtfulness. ‘What do you know, Sir Anthony, that I don’t?’

‘You’ll find out.’

So I found out and went through all the proper motions of consternation, incredulity and tight-lipped indignation. Finally I said: ‘You knew. How did you know?’

‘Obvious, isn’t it?’

‘Your transmitter,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s more than just out order. You had the same midnight caller.’

‘And the Orion.’ The mouth vanished again. ‘The big blue ketch lying close in. Only other craft in the harbour apart from us with a radio transmitter. Smashed. Just come from there.’

‘Smashed? Theirs as well? But who in God’s name – it must be the work of a madman.’

‘Is it? Is it the work of a madman? I know something of those matters. My first wife -’ He broke off abruptly and gave an odd shake of the head, then went on slowly: ‘The mentally disturbed are irrational, haphazard, purposeless, aimless in their behaviour patterns. This seems an entirely irrational act, but an act with a method and a purpose to it. Not haphazard. It’s planned. There’s a reason. At first I thought the reason was to cut off my connection with the mainland. But it can’t be that. By rendering me temporarily incommunicado nobody stands to gain, I don’t stand to lose.’

‘But you said the New York Stock -’

‘A bagatelle,’ he said contemptuously. ‘Nobody likes to lose money.’ Not more than a few millions anyway. ‘No, Mr Petersen, I am not the target. We have here an A and a B. A regards it as vital that he remains in constant communication with the mainland. B regards it as vital that A doesn’t. So B takes steps. There’s something damned funny going on in Torbay. And something big. I have a nose for such things.’

He was no fool but then not many morons have ended up as multi-millionaires. I couldn’t have put it better myself. I said: ‘Reported this to the police yet?’

‘Going there now. After I’ve made a phone call or two.’ The eyes suddenly became bleak and cold. ‘Unless our friend has smashed up the two public call boxes in the main street.’

‘He’s done better than that. He’s brought down the lines to the mainland. Somewhere down the Sound. No one knows where.’

He stared at me, wheeled to leave, then turned, his face empty of expression. ‘How did you know that?’ The tone matched the face.

‘Police told me. They were aboard with the customs last night.’

‘The police? That’s damned odd. What were the police doing here?’ He paused and looked at me with his cold measuring eyes. ‘A personal question, Mr Petersen. No impertinence intended. A question of elimination. What are you doing here? No offence.’

‘No offence. My friend and I are marine biologists. A working trip. Not our boat – the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries.’ I smiled. ‘We have impeccable references, Sir Anthony.’

‘Marine biology, eh? Hobby of mine, you might say. Layman, of course. Must have a talk sometime.’ He was speaking absent-mindedly, his thoughts elsewhere. ‘Could you describe the policeman, Mr Petersen?’

I did and he nodded. ‘That’s him all right. Odd, very odd. Must have a word with Archie about this.’

‘Archie?’

‘Sergeant MacDonald. This is my fifth consecutive season’s cruising based on Torbay. The South of France and the ægean can’t hold a candle to these waters. Know quite a few of the locals pretty well by this time. He was alone?’

‘No. A young constable. His son, he said. Melancholy sort of lad.’

‘Peter MacDonald. He has reason for his melancholy, Mr Petersen. His two young brothers, sixteen years old, twins, died a few months back.

At an Inverness school, lost in a late snow-storm in the Cairngorms. The father is tougher, doesn’t show it so much. A great tragedy. I knew them both. Fine boys.’

I made some appropriate comment but he wasn’t listening.

‘I must be on my way, Mr Petersen. Put this damned strange affair in MacDonald’s hand. Don’t see that he can do much. Then off for a short cruise.’

I looked through the wheelhouse windows at the dark skies, the white-capped seas, the driving rain. ‘You picked a day for it.’

‘The rougher the better. No bravado. I like a mill-pond as well as any man. Just had new stabilisers fitted in the Clyde – we got back up here only two days ago – and it seems like a good day to try them out.’ He smiled suddenly and put out his hand. ‘Sorry to have barged in. Taken up far too much of your time. Seemed rude, I suppose. Some say I am. You and your colleague care to come aboard for a drink to-night? We eat early at sea. Eight o’clock, say? I’ll send the tender.’ That meant we didn’t rate an invitation to dinner, which would have made a change from Hunslett and his damned baked beans, but even an invitation like this would have given rise to envious tooth-gnashing in some of the stateliest homes in the land: it was no secret that the bluest blood in England, from Royalty downwards, regarded a holiday invitation to the island Skouras owned off the Albanian coast as the conferment of the social cachet of the year or any year. Skouras didn’t wait for an answer and didn’t seem to expect one. I didn’t blame him. It would have been many years since Skouras had discovered that it was an immutable law of human nature, human nature being what it is, that no one ever turned down one of his invitations.

‘You’ll be coming to tell me about your smashed transmitter and asking me what the devil I intend to do about it,’ Sergeant MacDonald said tiredly. ‘Well, Mr Petersen, I know all about it already. Sir Anthony Skouras was here half an hour ago Sir Anthony had a lot to say. And Mr Campbell, the owner of the Orion, has just left. He’d a lot to say, too.’

‘Not me, Sergeant. I’m a man of few words.’ I gave him what I hoped looked like a self-deprecatory smile. ‘Except, of course, when the police and customs drag me out of bed in the middle of the night. I take it our friends have left?’

‘Just as soon as they’d put us ashore. Customs are just a damn’ nuisance.’ Like myself, he looked as if he could do with some hours’ sleep. ‘Frankly, Mr Petersen, I don’t know what to do about the broken radio-transmitters. Why on earth – who on earth would want to do a daft vicious thing like that?’

‘That’s what I came to ask you.’

‘I can go aboard your boat,’ MacDonald said slowly. ‘I can take out my note-book, look around and see if I can’t find any clues. I wouldn’t know what to look for. Maybe if I knew something about fingerprinting and analysis and microscopy I might just find out something. But I don’t. I’m an island policeman, not a one-man Flying Squad. This is C.I.D. work and we’d have to call in Glasgow. I doubt if they’d send a couple of detectives to investigate a few smashed radio valves.’

‘Old man Skouras draws a lot of water.’

‘Sir?’

‘He’s powerful. He has influence. If Skouras wanted action I’m damned sure he could get it. If the need arose and the mood struck him I’m sure he could be a very unpleasant character indeed.’

‘There’s not a better man or a kinder man ever sailed into Torbay,’ MacDonald said warmly. That hard brown face could conceal practically anything that MacDonald wanted it to conceal but this time he was hiding nothing. ‘Maybe his ways aren’t my ways. Maybe he’s a hard, aye, a ruthless businessman. Maybe, as the papers hint, his private life wouldn’t bear investigation. That’s none of my business. But if you were to look for a man in Torbay to say a word against him, you’ll have a busy time on your hands, Mr Petersen.’

‘You’ve taken me up wrongly. Sergeant,’ I said mildly. ‘I don’t even know the man.’

‘No. But we do. See that?’ He pointed through the side window of the police station to a large Swedish-style timber building beyond the pier. ‘Our new village hall. Town hall, they call it. Sir Anthony gave us that. Those six wee chalets up the hill there? For old folks. Sir Anthony again -every penny from his own pocket. Who takes all the schoolchildren to the Oban Games – Sir Anthony on the Shangri-la. Contributes to every charity going and now he has plans to build a boatyard to give employment to the young men of Torbay – there’s not much else going since the fishing-boats left.’

‘Well, good for old Skouras,’ I said. ‘He seems to have adopted the place. Lucky Torbay. I wish he’d buy me a new radio-transmitter.’

‘I’ll keep my eyes and ears open, Mr Petersen. I can’t do more. If anything turns up I’ll let you know at once.’

I told him thanks, and left. I hadn’t particularly wanted to go there, but it would have looked damned odd if I hadn’t turned up to add my pennyworth to the chorus of bitter complaint.

I was very glad that I had turned up.

The midday reception from London was poor. This was due less to the fact that reception is always better after dark than to the fact that I couldn’t use our telescopic radio mast: but it was fair enough and Uncle’s voice was brisk and businesslike and clear.

‘Well, Caroline, we’ve found our missing friends,’ he said.

‘How many?’ I asked cautiously. Uncle Arthur’s ambiguous references weren’t always as clear as Uncle Arthur imagined them to be.

‘All twenty-five.’ That made it the former crew of the Nantesville. ‘Two of them are pretty badly hurt but they’ll be all right.’ That accounted for the blood I had found in the captain’s and one of the engineers’ cabins.

‘Where?’ I asked.

He gave me a map reference. Just north of Wexford. The Nantesville had sailed from Bristol, she couldn’t have been more than a few hours on her way before she’d run into trouble.

‘Exactly the same procedure as on the previous occasions,’ Uncle Arthur was saying. ‘Held in a lonely farmhouse for a couple of nights. Plenty to eat and drink and blankets to keep the cold out. Then they woke up one morning and found their guards had gone.’

‘But a different procedure in stopping the – our friend?’ I’d almost said Nantesville and Uncle Arthur wouldn’t have liked that at all.

‘As always. We must concede them a certain ingenuity, Caroline. After having smuggled men aboard in port, then using the sinking fishing-boat routine, the police launch routine and the yacht with the appendicitis case aboard, I thought they would be starting to repeat themselves. But this time they came up with a new one – possibly because it’s the first time they’ve hi-jacked a ship during the hours of darkness. Carley rafts, this time, with about ten survivors aboard, dead ahead of the vessel. Oil all over the sea. A weak distress flare that couldn’t have been seen a mile away and probably was designed that way. You know the rest.’

‘Yes, Annabelle.’ I knew the rest. After that the routine was always the same. The rescued survivors, displaying a marked lack of gratitude, would whip out pistols, round up the crew, tie black muslin bags over their heads so that they couldn’t identify the vessel that would appear within the hour to take them off, march them on board the unknown vessel, land them on some lonely beach during the dark then march them again, often a very long way indeed, till they arrived at their prison. A deserted farmhouse. Always a deserted farmhouse. And always in Ireland, three times in the north and now twice in the south. Meantime the prize crew sailed the hi-jacked vessel to God alone knew where and the first the world knew of the disappearance of the pirated vessel was when the original crew, released after two or three days’ painless captivity, would turn up at some remote dwelling and start hollering for the nearest telephone.

‘Betty and Dorothy,’ I said. ‘Were they still in safe concealment when the crew were taken off?’

‘I imagine so. I don’t know. Details are still coming in and I understand the doctors won’t let anyone see the captain yet.’ Only the captain had known of the presence aboard of Baker and Delmont. ‘Forty-one hours now, Caroline. What have you done?’

For a moment I wondered irritably what the devil he was talking about. Then I remembered. He’d given me forty-eight hours. Seven were gone.

‘I’ve had three hours’ sleep.’ He’d consider that an utter waste of time, his employees weren’t considered to need sleep. ‘I’ve talked to the constabulary ashore. And I’ve talked to a wealthy yachtsman, next boat to us here. We’re paying him a social call to-night.’

There was a pause. ‘You’re doing what to-night, Caroline?’

‘Visiting. We’ve been invited. Harriet and I. For drinks.’

This time the pause was markedly longer. Then he said: ‘You have forty-one hours, Caroline.’

‘Yes, Annabelle.’

‘We assume you haven’t taken leave of your senses.’

‘I don’t know how unanimous informed opinion might be about that. I don’t think I have.’

‘And you haven’t given up? No, not that. You’re too damn’ stiff-necked and – and -’

‘Stupid?’

‘Who’s the yachtsman?’

I told him. It took me some time, partly because I had to spell out names with the aid of his damned code-book, partly because I gave him a very full account of everything Skouras had said to me and everything Sergeant MacDonald had said about Skouras. When his voice came again it was cagey and wary. As Uncle Arthur couldn’t see me I permitted myself a cynical grin. Even Cabinet Ministers found it difficult to make the grade as far as Skouras’s dinner-table, but the Permanent Under-Secretaries, the men with whom the real power of government lies, practically had their own initialled napkin rings. Under-Secretaries were the bane of Uncle Arthur’s life.

‘You’ll have to watch your step very carefully here, Caroline.’

‘Betty and Dorothy aren’t coming home any more, Annabelle. Someone has to ay. I want someone to pay. You want someone to pay. We all do.’

‘But it’s inconceivable that a man in his position, a man of his wealth -’

‘I’m sorry, Annabelle. I don’t understand.’

‘A man like that. Dammit all, I know him well, Caroline. We dine together. First-name terms. Know his present wife even better. Ex-actress. A philanthropist like that. A man who’s spent five consecutive seasons there. Would a man like that, a millionaire like that, spend all that time, all that money, just to build up a front -’

‘Skouras?’ I used the code name. Interrogatory, incredulous, as if it had just dawned upon me what Uncle Arthur was talking about. ‘I never said I suspected him, Annabelle. I have no reason to suspect him.’

‘Ah!’ It’s difficult to convey a sense of heartfelt gladness, profound satisfaction and brow-mopping relief in a single syllable, but Uncle Arthur managed it without any trouble. ‘Then why go?’ A casual eavesdropper might have thought he detected a note of pained jealousy in Uncle Arthur’s voice, and the casual eavesdropper would have been right. Uncle Arthur had only one weakness in his make-up – he was a social snob of monumental proportions.

‘I want aboard. I want to see this smashed transmitter of his.’

‘Why?’

‘A hunch, let me call it, Annabelle. No more.’

Uncle Arthur was going in for the long silences in a big way to-day. Then he said: ‘A hunch? A hunch? You told me this morning you were on to something.’

‘There’s something else. I want you to contact the Post Office Savings Bank, Head Office, in Scotland. After that, the Records files of some Scottish newspapers. I suggest The Glasgow Herald, the Scottish Daily Express and, most particularly, the West Highland weekly, the Oban Times.’

‘Ah!’ No relief this time, just satisfaction. ‘This is more like it, Caroline. What do you want and why?’

So I told him what I wanted and why, lots more of the fancy code work, and when I’d finished he said: ‘I’ll have my staff on to this straight away. I’ll have all the information you want by midnight.’

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.